Suffering Curse -How to over come It

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Have you ever tried explaining the concept of neuroplasticity to a novice? No? Then, have you ever tried explaining

how intermittent fasting works to someone who just couldn’t get it? You know, you tell your friend how insulin levels

drop, the body eventually shifts to a state of ketosis and starts using fatty acids as its main source of energy instead of

glucose, and how this gradually decreases body fat percentage.

What is the Curse of Knowledge?

You are suffering from the curse of knowledge when you know things that the other person does not and you have

forgotten what it’s like to not have this knowledge. This makes it harder for you to identify with the other person’s

situation and explain things in a manner that is easily understandable to someone who is a novice.

When you suffer from the curse of knowledge you assume that other people know the things that you do, and this

cognitive bias causes you to believe that people understand you a lot better than they really do.

In a famous psychological experiment, a group of subjects was divided in two: tappers and listeners. The tappers

were asked to think of a song and try to rhythmically tap the song on a table, while the listeners were asked to listen

and figure out which song the tappers were tapping along to.

The tappers were 50% certain that the listeners would be able to identify the song they had had in mind while

tapping, but the results of the experiment were shocking: only 2.5% of the listeners were able to figure out the song!

In other words: the tappers overestimated their success ratio of being understood 20 times above how many times

they actually were being understood.

How do you view suffering as a blessing or a curse

When we suffer from the curse of knowledge, we are like the tappers: just because we know the melody of the song

we’re tapping to we inaccurately assume that others will know it too. But often, the other person—the listener—

doesn’t draw the same conclusions that we do because this person doesn’t have the same information as we do. In

the case of the listeners, they weren’t able to identify the tapping as a song, they only heard a series of discordant

tappings. If we extrapolate these results to communication in general, it means that we think people understand what

we’re saying a hell of a lot more often than they actually do—because we’re so used to knowing the things we know

that we expect others to know it as well.

What are the implications?

One major implication of the curse of knowledge is that the right people aren’t being listened to.

A: I mean that the people who are being listened to usually aren’t those in the best position to give advice. We tend to

listen to those people whom we perceive have authority. We use social proof as a means to establish the credibility of

these authorities. And often that works well, but not always.

The reason it doesn’t always work out that well is due to what I call the student-master dilemma. This dilemma often

occurs when a person who is highly skilled in a particular field of knowledge is trying to teach, inform, or instruct beginners about what they should do to get better.

In theory it’s a sure thing that you’d want to be instructed by one of these “masters,” but in practice it might not be

the best thing because the master tends to suffer from the curse of knowledge.